AllThingsD » Portland

Viral Video: Let the Hipster Games Begin!

Kara Swisher — Mon, 09 Apr 2012 07:16:26 +0000

I meant to post this last week — a very clever spoof on the hit movie “The Hunger Games.”

This version: “The Hipster Games,” with ironic young people from five districts — Portland, Austin, Brooklyn, Oakland and Silverlake in Los Angeles — fighting to the death for that old Talking Heads vinyl record album.

Enjoy:

Wal-Mart Acquires Small Mobile Agency to Beef Up Tech Team

Tricia Duryee — Wed, 04 Jan 2012 18:08:31 +0000

Wal-Mart’s technology division, @WalmartLabs, has acquired Small Society, a mobile agency in Portland, Ore. In a blog post, Wal-Mart said the company will join another acquisition it made in the Northwest, and both will work closely with its Silicon Valley offices. Small Society has developed apps for large organizations, including the Democratic National Committee, Zipcar and Starbucks. Terms were not disclosed.

Google Launches Offers in San Francisco and New York

Tricia Duryee — Tue, 12 Jul 2011 17:27:50 +0000

After seeing some early success in the daily deals space in Portland, Ore., Google has rolled out Google Offers in three additional markets. This morning it launched in two San Francisco markets — The City and the East Bay — and New York City. In San Francisco, it was offering $4 off at Bob’s Donut & Pastry Shop. Google’s Offers business is a precursor to rolling out mobile payments.

Google Offers Holding Its Own Against Groupon in Portland

Tricia Duryee — Wed, 22 Jun 2011 20:27:38 +0000

Google may have a shot at entering the daily deals market despite being very, very late to it.

After Groupon turned down Google’s $6 billion offer, the online search giant boldly decided to start from scratch and build its own service.

Now, after 22 days in the Portland, Ore., market, it looks like it may have a chance — especially after yesterday.

Google offered $10 for $20 at Powell’s Books, which is one of the most iconic bookstores in the Pacific Northwest.

Within 24 hours, it sold 5,000 offers — by far its biggest day.

The Powell’s offer also represents the third time that one of its deals has sold out. The bookstore offer was capped at 5,000 and an arcade maxed out at 750. An offer for a restaurant also sold out.

Otherwise, Google’s performance has matched the relative value of the offers.

A dentist here, a cup of coffee or a haircut there, resulted in dozens to hundreds of sales, but nothing outstanding. Only one other offer sold more than 1,000, and that was for $20 worth of food and drinks at a bar for only $7.

In fact, today’s offer has the opportunity to be the worst performing of all, falling off a cliff from yesterday’s banner performance to only six deals by 1 pm.

While there are some signs Google could be performing decently, it’s difficult to compare to either pre-IPO Groupon, or its next closest example, LivingSocial.

For one, the scale is completely different.

Google is live in only one market; Groupon is in 175 — and that’s just in North America.

Google has sold at least 8,473 total deals in the 12 deals it displays; Groupon has sold 28 million in the first three months of the year.

It’s particularly hard to calculate in Portland. Google lists a dozen of its offers and how many it sold on one page, making it very simple to see how its performed over time.

Groupon does not do that and a spokesperson declined to share that information with me.

However, the data is still readily available on the Web if you can find it. For instance, on June 19, Groupon sold 187 deals for dance lessons. A day earlier, Google sold 209 mens’ haircuts. On June 14, Groupon sold 413 teeth whitening deals. On the same day, Google sold 750 deals to an arcade.

Even with those numbers, it’s difficult to draw any conclusions since Groupon sometimes offers more than one a day and sells deals through third parties that would not register on the site.

While the data set is extremely limited, at least initially, it appears that Google’s experiment has not failed — it continues to increases both sales and the quality of offers over time.

But it will be a while yet before we see the entire impact of Google’s offering. Much of Google’s volume will ultimately be initiated from the phone, not the Web.

At the D conference in May, Google’s Executive Chairman Eric Schmidt and VP of Commerce Stephanie Tilenius demonstrated on stage how Google Offers will be used in conjunction with Google Wallet, the mobile payments service it is building for Android.

Rather than charging merchants to use the Wallet, Google will make money from a plethora of well-targeted offers inside.

With Goopon Stealing the Spotlight, Tippr Says Don't Forget About No. 3 (Or Its Patents)

Tricia Duryee — Thu, 02 Dec 2010 15:00:01 +0000

Tippr CEO Martin Tobias hopes that between Google’s potential big-ticket purchase of Groupon (a.k.a. Goopon) and Amazon’s pending investment in LivingSocial, consolidation in the group-buying space will accelerate as others scramble for a partner.

As the No. 3 in the market, the Seattle-based company may be the next candidate, if things remain as frothy as they have been.

“My phone is certainly ringing,” Tobias said in an email yesterday.

Tippr has taken a slightly different approach than either LivingSocial or Groupon. It doesn’t have thousands of employees, for example–only 45, of whom 24 are in sales.

In February, it had launched in Seattle with five subscribers. Today, it’s up to 13 markets and “hundreds of thousands of subscribers.” The growth is not only thanks to their own sites, but also by enabling others to join the group-buying frenzy, as well.

Tippr wants to be a platform, not a brand, so if you haven’t heard of it, it’s possible you never will. Even in Seattle, deals seem sporadic, and most offers are from places within walking distance of Tippr’s Queen Anne neighborhood office.

But, to cast a wider net, Tippr recently signed a partnership with Belo Corp., a television network that leverages Tippr’s platform to power its own local deals site, Yollar.com. It uses its own local sales force to make deals with merchants in markets such as Dallas, San Antonio, Houston, Seattle, St. Louis, Portland and Boise. All these individual sites, powered by their own sales force, creates a magnifying affect that Groupon can only match by adding more sales people.

“Groupon is not like Facebook or eBay, where the winner takes all,” he said. “This is more like search.”

EBay became successful by generating a critical mass of buyers and sellers, and Facebook has staying power because once you define your social network, Tobias posits, you don’t want to have to build it again.

“With Groupon there’s nothing locking you in,” he said. “You haven’t invested anything, and the merchants don’t care either.”

Tobias talks tough–despite the apparent lack of interest from Google or Amazon–because he believes he has the IP to back it up. In November 2009, he acquired the patent portfolio of defunct Mercata, a Paul Allen-backed group-buying venture from Web 1.0.

He traded stock in Tippr’s parent company Kashless for the patents, which include more than half a dozen granted patents covering areas like price optimization, demand curve modeling and buyer-seller interaction models. Today, Tippr is announcing a strategy around these patents. A spokesperson said its new “patent licensing program for group-buying” will charge anyone, from white label partners to competitors (theoretically, Groupon), a fee to license them.

Tobias is also bullish, because in his last venture he was attempting something much larger. As CEO of Imperium Renewables, he raised around $500 million in capital to produce biodiesel on a mass scale, which he admits is not enough “when taking on Exxon.”

But taking on Groupon, which may have annual revenues of up to $500 million? To him, that’s doable.

Jive CEO Zingale and Kleiner Moneybags Schlein Talk About Socializing Business

Kara Swisher — Fri, 20 Aug 2010 19:54:06 +0000

In my ongoing quest to follow the money, BoomTown showed up at the Palo Alto, Calif., offices of Jive Software last week to talk about its recent $30 million funding from Kleiner Perkins.

Its existing venture investor, Sequoia Capital, was also in the round, which brings the grand total of dough to $57 million, all dedicated to making Jive the leader in bringing social tools to the enterprise.

It’s probably too lazy to say Jive’s goal is to be the Facebook for businesses, but that just about sums it up–offering software for social collaboration in the workplace.

That includes communications, blogging, polls, sharing and other typical kinds of social networking features, trying to give workers what they already have easy access to in their personal lives.

That includes tapping outside sources people use–including a recent integration of LinkedIn profiles and Twitter tweets.

That’s no small business, but it is also one that is rife with all kinds of competitors, big and small, all trying to solve the problem in different ways.

It’s a big marketplace to win, of course, which is why Jive brought in CEO Tony Zingale earlier this year, part of a move toward an IPO.

He is a longtime tech exec, most recently as head of Mercury Interactive, which sold to Hewlett-Packard (HPQ) for $4.5 billion.

Zingale, who has moved Jive’s HQ from Portland, Ore., to Silicon Valley, has been trying to juice business, which is now 3,000 customers and 15 million users, and is aiming for $100 million in revenue run rate this year.

Zingale talked about all this and more in the video interview below, along with Kleiner partner Ted Schlein, who has joined the Jive board.

Here it is:

[ See post to watch video ]

Social E-Commerce Goes Into Overdrive: LivingSocial Raises Another $14 Million

Kara Swisher — Thu, 29 Apr 2010 11:30:29 +0000

Could the social group-buying space get any frothier?

Well, yes, it could.

After the recent $135 million funding of Groupon that valued the Chicago start-up at upwards of an eye-popping $1 billion, rival LivingSocial announced to today that it had raised a more modest $14 million in a Series C round.

The Washington, D.C. start-up had raised $25 million in a Series B venture financing only a month ago. And it raised $10 million on top of that since 2008.

Sources estimated the valuation for LivingSocial is several hundred million dollars now.

The newest round was led by Lightspeed Venture Partners; Earlier investors U.S. Venture Partners, Grotech Ventures and Steve Case’s Revolution are also participating.

Ironically, Case’s former No. 2 at AOL (AOL), Ted Leonsis has been an early investor in Groupon.

LivingSocial said it will use the new pile of cash to expand to dozens of new markets, adding it was launching four new cities now: Portland, Orange County, Charlotte and Philadelphia.

It now operates in 18 cities across the country.

For those in Silicon Valley who do not consider these prices for all these social e-commerce sites high at all, BoomTown is here to tell you that in the real world the figure is not actually modest, except in comparison.

But LivingSocial will need every penny if it is to compete with Groupon and a growing spate of competitors in the local space, much as is also happening in the social status update arena.

The local outcome for most will inevitably be a sale to a big Internet company like Amazon (AMZN).

Or oblivion, especially since so many similar offerings makes the whole market confusing for both local businesses and customers

In general, most offer a daily deal with a huge discount on a wide range of products and services–from spas to skydiving–in dozens of U.S. cities, for large groups of potential buyers on the Web, through email or via social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter.

Using social tools, the idea is use collective buying power to get low prices and push customers to local businesses.

If a deal reaches the number of buyers it needs, which can be in the thousands, these services sell vouchers to the consumers and collect a hefty fee for the sale from the businesses it sends customers to.

The plus for many small businesses is to get a crack at a lot of new consumers–think of it as social networking lead-generation.

This kind of thing has been tried before, of course, centering on consumers who group together to get discounts on items by purchasing in bulk.

In Web 1.0, there were many group-buying sites, most of which failed badly. One of the more high-profile ones, Mercata, received $90 million in funding from investors, including Paul Allen’s Vulcan Ventures.

No matter in 2010!

That’s due to the VC frenzy going on, spurred by winner-take-all theories–Groupon, for example, got most of its recent mountain of cash from champion Russian overspenders, Digital Sky Technologies.

However it turns out, here is LivingSocial’s official press release:

LivingSocial Raises $14 Million Series C Round Led by Lightspeed Venture Partners; Launches in Portland, Orange County, Charlotte and Philadelphia

Company Also Begins Offering Hyperlocal Deals in Seattle Area–Users Can Now Get Deals Even Closer to their Homes

$14 Million Round Comes on Heels of $25 Million Series B Announcement Last Month

Washington D.C., April 29, 2010–LivingSocial, the social commerce leader behind LivingSocial Deals and top Facebook applications Visual Bookshelf and Pick Your Five, today announced that it has completed a $14 million Series C round of venture funding led by Lightspeed Venture Partners, with U.S. Venture Partners, Grotech Ventures and Steve Case’s Revolution, LLC participating. Because of the rapid growth, and high user demand, LivingSocial will use the capital infusion to expand into additional markets–bringing Deals to dozens more cities throughout the U.S. in 2010. This additional funding comes on the heels of the company’s recent $25 million Series B round announced last month.

“We’ve known and admired the LivingSocial team for a long time, and I have bought many of their terrific local offers. They’ve done an excellent job of growing their user base through smart media buying and excellent knowledge of social channels and virality,” said Jeremy Liew, managing director of Lightspeed Venture Partners. “With this financing round, LivingSocial is very well positioned to bring their great offers to even more people.”

LivingSocial is also launching its Deals program in four new markets: Portland, Orange County, Charlotte and Philadelphia. This brings LivingSocial live in 18 cities across the country with major plans to expand to dozens of markets throughout the year.

“We’re constantly receiving requests from our users to expand and launch in their markets, and this recent funding round will allow us to do just that,” said Tim O’Shaughnessy, CEO and co-founder of LivingSocial. “We’re really excited to introduce LivingSocial to Portland, Orange County, Charlotte and Philadelphia to continue generating huge savings for our users and even bigger returns for our merchants.”

LivingSocial users throughout the country saved an average of more than $32 each in March, and have saved tens of millions of dollars since the launch of Deals in 2009. By signing up for LivingSocial’s free daily online service, people are saving an average of 50-70% at their favorite places, such as the hottest local restaurants, spas, sporting events, hotels, and other local attractions.

Because LivingSocial wants to give consumers more availability to the program, the company is launching hyperlocal deals for the Seattle area. Now consumers in areas like Tacoma and Bellevue will start getting deals targeted to their location, in addition to Seattle proper. Hyperlocal deals not only help more consumers explore new things in their city, but these deals also provide merchants with a greater opportunity to reach local audiences on the LivingSocial Deals platform.

LivingSocial is now live in 18 markets including: Washington, D.C., New York City, Boston, Atlanta, Austin, Seattle, San Francisco, Los Angeles, the Twin Cities, Chicago, Raleigh Durham, Denver, San Diego, the San Fernando Valley, Portland, Orange County, Charlotte and Philadelphia. Dozens of additional cities are expected to roll out in the coming months. For more information or to sign up your city, go to http://livingsocial.com.

Tweets, Google Maps Help Solve Mystery of Portland Explosion

Jennifer Valentino-DeVries — Wed, 31 Mar 2010 07:00:51 +0000

On Sunday night, a loud boom shook parts of Portland, Ore.–and drove residents onto Twitter and elsewhere on the Internet to figure out the cause.

On Twitter, people used the hashtag #pdxboom to relay news about the noise. And in a sign of the potential for using social media in emergencies, one resident soon set up a Google (GOOG) map that residents could use to indicate how loud the sound was in their area. Marshall Kirkpatrick at tech blog ReadWriteWeb has the story here and writes that “in just a few hours, a pattern emerged, with reports clustering around one city park.”

The Portland police cited “local blogging information” as one of the factors that led investigators to return to the area, where they found evidence of a large pipe bomb.

Read the rest of this post on the original site

Viral Video: The Muppets Do "Bohemian Rhapsody"

Kara Swisher — Wed, 25 Nov 2009 08:51:15 +0000

While BoomTown is trapped on, oops, fully enjoying, an overnight train trip to Portland for the Thanksgiving holiday (and just beginning to sweat from not enough broadband), here’s a very funny video of the Muppets doing Queen.

The puppets–part of the Disney (DIS) Muppets Studio–just got themselves a channel on YouTube.

Here’s one of the more popular video posts so far, a most excellent version of “Bohemian Rhapsody,” done with chickens.

After seeing it, you have to ask yourself: Can it be done any other way going forward?

I think not, but you be the judge:

Almost Famous: Elemental Technologies' Sam Blackman

Drake Martinet — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 23:01:48 +0000

A new feature wherein All Things Digital looks at up-and-coming and innovative start-ups you should know about.

This week: We caught up with Sam Blackman, CEO of Elemental Technologies at the San Francisco NewTeeVee Live conference.

Elemental Technologies hopes to become a major player in the future of online and over-the-air video through its high-performance encoding technology.

Who: Sam Blackman

What: CEO and Chairman of Elemental Technologies.

Why: People want to watch live video on all their devices. Making a new version of a given video for every device is time- and processor-intensive. Elemental says it can replace up to five existing dedicated servers with one of its own, based on its proprietary software.

Where: @elementaltech (Twitter); company blog; Portland (analog place).

Who else: Sam says, “We’re the first-ever company to take advantage of GPUs for video processing,” but Nvidia (NVDA) is the key hardware player.

Five Stats You Won’t Find in His Facebook Profile

Worst Job: Barista. Late for the Trolley coffee. It had this really abusive owner. He’d yell at us if we gave a half-pump too much flavoring.

Gadget of the Moment: Lenovo X301. It’s all about the keyboard.

Early Geek Influence: Jack Dudman. He was a neighbor growing up and was Steve Jobs’s math teacher at Reed College.

Wishes There Was an App for That: A really smart public transit app. Like one that knows where I am and can tell me which of the options near me I can go to, to get to my destination fastest.

Sport You Can’t Live Without: Ultimate Frisbee

Bio in 140 Characters

Raised in Oregon. EE at Brown. Time at Intel, then Pixelworks. Left to start Elemental Technologies. Loves work, kids and Ultimate Frisbee.

The Five Questions

Elemental’s products seem pretty hardcore geeky. Break it down for me.

The man on the street today wants to view video on any device at any time. The content owners of that video need to be able to format the video differently for each type of device ["transcoding"]. We make that process much cheaper. At the beginning, we saw that there was going to be a huge increase in the amount of video produced out there, but that it was hard to distribute.

Right now it’s really hard [lots of equipment and time] to create, say, 240 versions of every video [so that they can be viewed quickly on an iPhone and in HD on a laptop, for instance]. Four to five regular CPU [central processing unit] servers can be replaced by one of our servers with a GPU [graphical processing unit] and our software. That means far less cost for businesses and many more video options for the consumer.

Device variations are just exploding. How do you see the changing landscape moving your business?

I don’t see the number of video formats decreasing at all. Every company that [produces] a device wants to control delivery to it. No one is going to dominate the cellphone market. It’s just too big. You can get three percent and have a nice business. As long as that is the way the game is played, our products will be very desirable.

Why are you going to be the first software company to acquire an auto body shop?

That’s my dream. The way our product works is, when we take an order, we just submit the hardware request to Dell (DELL). They plug in a GPU. We take the box and add our software.

The funny story is that we wanted a more custom look, so we found this auto body shop in Portland that takes the bezels [rack server face plates], sands them, cleans them, repaints them and sends them back. They look beautiful, like tons of engineering went into it. Dell will do that for you, but its 20 grand, and we’re a start-up. That’s my dream, a company that doesn’t have any employees who drive to work but owns an auto body shop.

Every geek has a memory where they saw something new and had to say to themselves, “Dang, I love living in the future.” What’s yours?

I know exactly what that was. Turtle graphics. My mother put me in a programming class in kindergarten, and there was this thing called LOGO [where you could use computer instructions to make an onscreen turtle draw something]. I had an hour class where I figured out how to draw a square. I went home that night and wrote down on paper a program that would draw the American flag.

My neighbor had an Apple (AAPL) IIc that I used to input that first program. I probably stayed up all night as a six-year-old doing that and that was it for me. What a genius idea. I mean, kids love seeing results, and there were no visual results [from programming] for a long time. LOGO was the first thing where you could spend about an hour and get visual results.

What tech war are you watching most closely?

There’s a battle looming between Intel (INTC) and Nvidia, as Intel releases their own GPU architecture. We’re trying to be really well-positioned to benefit from that arms race of the FLOPS [the processing performance unit].

The In Living Color Interview

[ See post to watch video ]

SurveyMonkey's Dave Goldberg Speaks! (Plus a Tour of His New Planet of the Apes Lair in Silicon Valley)

Kara Swisher — Mon, 17 Aug 2009 13:09:56 +0000

BoomTown was as surprised as anyone when longtime Silicon Valley Web music entrepreneur Dave Goldberg said in May that his next move was going to be investing in and running an online survey company with the unusual name of SurveyMonkey.

Most expected the former Yahoo music head to land at an entertainment or media giant, running its digital operations.

But it is at SurveyMonkey where Goldberg has swung himself and he has now made good on his promise to open a Silicon Valley office of the Portland-based start-up.

But Goldberg’s background does not suggest an interest in digital clipboards and checking boxes.

He joined Yahoo (YHOO) in 2001 and headed its global music operations after it bought a company he co-founded in 1994 called LAUNCH Media.

Previous to that, Goldberg was director of marketing strategy and new business development at Capitol Records in Los Angeles.

After leaving Yahoo more than two years ago, he worked for a while as an entrepreneur-in-residence at Benchmark Capital and told me he was attracted to the online survey creator most of all for three key reasons:

It’s profitable. It’s an open field. And, it’s much more of a consumer product than people realize.

That’s presumably why he also put up some money to become a minority investor in SurveyMonkey.

It was part of a deal in which Spectrum Equity Investors and others, including Bain Capital Ventures, acquired a majority interest in the company.

Since it was founded in 1999 by Ryan Finley and Chris Finley, who remained minority investors and working at the company, SurveyMonkey has become the largest such survey company online, with competitors that include Zoomerang and Constant Contact.

SurveyMonkey–which has signed up two million users, with six million surveys created and 200 million responses completed–charges a variety of fees for premium versions of its service, sitting between expensive software packages on one side and free, featureless Web surveys on the other.

Here’s a video interview I did with Goldberg last week about all this and more, as well as a tour of the new SurveyMonkey digs in Menlo Park, Calif., in former CBS (CBS) Interactive space:

[ See post to watch video ]

Former Yahoo Music Exec Dave Goldberg to Head SurveyMonkey

Kara Swisher — Mon, 20 Apr 2009 14:41:19 +0000

Former Yahoo music head Dave Goldberg–who has been an entrepreneur-in-residence at Benchmark Capital since he left the Internet company more than two years ago–has finally landed at another company, sources said, taking over as CEO of SurveyMonkey.

Goldberg (pictured here) will head the Portland-based private company, which is an online survey creator, including offering analytics of the results.

Sources said he will also become a minority investor in SurveyMonkey, as part of a deal in which Spectrum Equity Investors and other investors, including Bain Capital Ventures, are acquiring a majority interest in the company.

A Federal Trade Commission site on Friday noted that Spectrum had gotten antitrust approval for a transaction, but did not name Goldberg or SurveyMonkey. But it did name SurveyMonkey co-founder Ryan Finley as also getting approval.

Since it was founded in 1999 by Ryan Finley and Chris Finley, who will remain minority investors in the deal, SurveyMonkey has signed up two million users, six million surveys have been created and 200 million responses have been completed.

It charges a variety of subscription fees for its services and is profitable, with an offering that sits between expensive software packages on one side and free, featureless Web surveys on the other.

SurveyMonkey is the largest such survey company online, with competitors that include Zoomerang and Constant Contact.

The move is an unusual one for Goldberg, whom many expected to join or start an online entertainment or music company, given his background.

He joined Yahoo (YHOO) in 2001 and headed its global music operations after it bought a company he co-founded in 1994 called LAUNCH Media. Previous to that, Goldberg was director of marketing strategy and new business development at Capitol Records in Los Angeles.

Goldberg has been on the board of the Generations Network, which owns Ancestry.com and which is a Spectrum investment.

Sources said Goldberg will open an office in Silicon Valley and recruit several dozen new employees to expand the business.

MicroHoo: The Odd Couple Meetings Led Nowhere

Kara Swisher — Sun, 04 May 2008 02:39:52 +0000

After today’s events, I guess you could say Yahoo (YHOO) and Microsoft (MSFT) tried, holding a series of meetings about a possible takeover that ended up proving exactly how incompatible the companies were.

Kind of like Oscar Madison and Felix Unger, but not funny in any way at all.

Consider a series of meetings, according to sources close to both companies, that took place over the last several weeks, which finally came after Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer lobbed the Saturday stink-bomb letter to Yahoo in early April, saying he planned to go hostile.

That apparently prompted some movement out of Yahoo, which had been trying to avoid any kind of substantive discussions with Microsoft until then and had been spending its time looking for all sorts of semi-wacky alternatives.

Thus, according to sources close to Microsoft, a meeting on April 15 in Portland, Ore. (a state in which BoomTown said meetings were likely to take place last week).

At that meeting, Yahoo execs laid out the same case they had been doing for investors, a road-show presentation of the company’s growth plans to underscore its case for a higher valuation.

At the same time, Yahoo would not give a specific valuation for the company at that meeting, said sources.

But on a call with bankers and advisers from both sides on April 18, a big number was put forward by Yahoo of at least $40 a share. This was, of course, a nonstarter for Microsoft, which began plans for its hostile proxy fight.

As the deadline loomed on April 29, Yahoo sources said execs there wanted to avoid such a battle.

So Yang and Yahoo Chairman Roy Bostock held phone calls with Ballmer two times that day to suggest ways to avoid a hostile bid and also a walk-away move by Microsoft.

They also suggested, said Microsoft sources, other kinds of deals short of a merger, including a search partnership. Ballmer suggested a face-to-face meeting the next day, on April 30.

At that meeting, which took place in Silicon Valley at Yahoo’s law firm, Yang suggested $38. He also continued to press on major issues like possibly problematic regulatory issues around the pair’s email domination and also suggested the idea of a search deal, like the one Yahoo had been discussing with Google (GOOG).

Finally, as a last-ditch effort, Yang and David Filo–who founded Yahoo with Yang while the pair were at Stanford University as grad students–flew to Microsoft’s home in the Seattle area today to meet at the airport with Ballmer and also Kevin Johnson, the main Microsoft exec who had been spearheading the deal.

It was, of course, the kind of meeting–just the key execs alone–that should have taken place months ago.

Ballmer suggested $33 and a plan to assuage Yahoo’s regulatory worries, while Yang countered with $37, a price the board had approved, even though both Filo and Yang wanted the higher prices.

Worst of all, Yang told Ballmer that, if Microsoft chose to conduct a proxy fight, he would not abandon pursuing the deal with Google to outsource Yahoo’s online ad business, which Yahoo could sign even if Microsoft made a hostile bid.

Such a deal with its archrival, Microsoft execs thought, was impossible to accept and could also be hard to unwind.

“There was not a lot more to say after that,” said a source close to Microsoft.

Yang and Filo left the meeting, but the die was cast. While they expected a counter, Ballmer instead lowered the boom in a phone call and sent a letter saying so in detail soon after.

Another Yahoo source who was told the details of the meeting agreed that even today’s meeting was probably a lost cause.

“There has never been a moment when there was agreement on anything,” said the source. “Can you just imagine how a merger would have been with this as a prelude?”

Indeed. Cats and dogs. AOL and Time Warner (TWX). Oil and Water. Obama and Hillary. You get the picture.